Carlson Taps Cook To Stir Up Its Meetings Services Unit

<B> Carlson Taps Cook To Stir Up Its Meetings Services Unit</B>

By Lauren Bielski

Carlson Wagonlit Travel has named 32-year-old Vince Cook general manager of its group travel and administration services and charged him with the task of streamlining its meeting services.

Cook initially will tackle the automation of the pre-trip process, oversee tying in a meetings component to the back- end capabilities of InterAct--Carlson's travel management reporting system--and sign corporate consolidation accounts.

Cook said that small meetings will benefit from Carlson's general explorations of automation. As to consolidation, he sees great potential to lure those clients for whom Carlson plans three or four meetings annually into a broader and more comprehensive consolidation.

In 1997, Carlson Meetings Management consolidated the meetings business of three unnamed clients. While the concept is spreading slowly, it offers big gains for both client and agency, Cook said, especially when the focus is on small meetings.

"Small meetings have been one key focus at the agency for the last four years. Our revised approach to servicing group business dovetails with Carlson's Magellan, renamed Mercury, which was an enhancement of our customer service through reengineering core processes," he said.

Cook said corporate meeting customers will see technological improvements from Carlson's Magellan-inspired housekeeping. "We're in the midst of looking at our meetings department and will be actively seeking out areas where we can trim operating costs and service clients faster, more consistently and with greater efficiencies," he said.

<b>Meeting Reporting Tie-In</b>

Carlson has been focusing its automation development on InterAct, which it hopes to eventually tie into the meetings program. The agency currently is developing links from internal meetings databases on hotel spend data, on-site expenditure accounting information and savings information on negotiated programs, so the back-end travel reporting system eventually will provide reports that combine meetings and transient data.

So far the InterAct system can accept group air reservation data and generate a snapshot of air usage that combines both group and individual business travel.

Whether the agency will opt for some sort of Internet front-end solution or not will be uncertain for awhile, Cook said. One possibility is expanding the point of sale system, called Traveler Management (BTN, Nov. 11, 1997), so that reservationists can capture critical meeting data from attendees. But a decision will take several months.

Coming from Carlson's operations support division and, prior to that, handling management of the agency's globally hotel negotiations, Cook has a comprehensive perspective of the corporate market. As the hotel program manager, Cook built an electronic hotel system that generated over $1.5 million in sales globally in its first year, and got an intimate working knowledge of key suppliers. That's an edge he hopes to share with an increasing number of corporate customers consolidating their meetings and transient businesses.